H.264 Is Magic
Sid Bala (via Gus Mueller, Hacker News):
Because now, you can take that frequency domain image and then mask out the edges - discard information which will contain the information with high frequency components. Now if you convert back to your regular x-y coordinates, you'll find that the resulting image looks similar to the original but has lost some of the fine details. But now, the image only occupies a fraction of the space. By controlling how big your mask is, you can now tune precisely how detailed you want your output images to be.
[…]
The Y is the luminance (essentially black and white brightness) and the Cb and Cr are the chrominance (color) components. RGB and YCbCr are equivalent in terms of information entropy. […] But check out the trick: the Y component gets encoded at full resolution. The C components only at a quarter resolution. Since the eye/brain is terrible at detecting color variations, you can get away with this. By doing this, you reduce total bandwidth by one half, with very little visual difference.
[…]
H.264 splits up the image into macro-blocks - typically 16x16 pixel blocks that it will use for motion estimation. It encodes one static image - typically called an I-frame(Intra frame). This is a full frame - containing all the bits it required to construct that frame. And then subsequent frames are either P-frames(predicted) or B-frames(bi-directionally predicted). P-frames are frames that will encode a motion vector for each of the macro blocks from the previous frame.
I was hoping the author would write about H.264 specifically, for instance, how it was basically the “dumping ground” of all the little tweaks and improvements that were pulled out of MPEG-4 for one reason or another (usually because they were too computationally expensive), and why, as a result, it has thousands of different combinations of features that are extremely complicated to support, which is why it had to be grouped into “profiles” (e.g., Baseline, Main, High).
I was also hoping that he would at least touch on the features that make H.264 unique from previous MPEG standards, like in-loop deblocking, CABAC Entropy Coding, etc..
